Vision from a dark world

‘VISION FROM A DARK WORLD’
MACON RAMOS- ARANETA
JUNE 24, 2012

“I DO whatever you do. I also do the Facebook. I chat. I surf the internet and go out with friends,” said Erick Marco Ramos

Marco is one of the 12 IRIS Awardees for ATRIEV’s outstanding graduates. He belonged to the more than 4 million Filipinos who are blind based on the latest estimates from the Department of Health.

Despite being blind, Marco was among those who fought to conquer the old cliché that blind people were limited only to massage and music. The story of Marco and his likes inspire others that there is “success beyond limits.”

ATRIEV or the Adaptive Technology for Rehabilitation, Integration and Empowerment of Visually Impaired is the country’s only computer school for the blind. It makes use of adaptive technology so that the blind and sight impaired individuals will have access to higher education and mainstream employment.

Adaptive technology allows the blind to gain access to computer-based content through various software applications. The screen reader program translates every keystroke and mouse click into a vocal response. The screen magnification software allows font size changes, color contrast changes and color and shape changes of the mouse pointer.

The ‘tools’ he learned from ATRIEV are what make Marco cope up with his studies at the Philippine Normal University (PNU) on Taft Avenue where he is a senior student in the Bachelor of Science in Education major in English Composition.

Marco was belting out an Edwin McCain song “I’ll Be” when we arrived at the SM Activity Center in SM Manila where the awarding was held Saturday (June 23) night.  The audience- and it was a crowd composed mostly of young ‘mall rats’, was enthralled by Marco’s cool voice. But one thing they didn’t notice was that Marco who wasn’t wearing any dark glasses, is blind.

After his performance was over, we sat with him for an interview. He blurted out with pride when I asked him about being an exchange student of the US Fullbright program that he had gone to the United States.

“Yes, I went to the University of Indiana in Evansville under the Rhetoric and Composition program of the College of Liberal Arts,” said Marco.

During his studies in the US, Marco performed at the top of his class. He also extolled he led a normal life there. “I moved around. I lived all alone by myself. I had no tour guide,” he related.

He recalled one of his PNU professors asked him if he’s serious with his plan to get a study-grant abroad. He believed it would be an excellent experience.

Conceding it was a kind of “weird” because of his disability, Marco remembered telling himself and his professor that “It would be fine with him to study abroad.” So he filed the application forms for the Global Undergraduate Exchange Program funded by the US Department of State.

In April 2010, Marco became the first visually impaired grantee for the program which is a global competition involving 20 from the Western Hemisphere and East Asia-Pacific regions. Applicants are initially judged on the basis of academic and co-curricular merits.

Back at the PNU, Marco said he is the only visually impaired in his classes of sighted people. But this was no hindrance for Marco who is expected to graduate with honors during the school’s commencement exercises in 2013.

Marco is also the president of the school’s Debate Society, and has won competitions. Last February, Marco and his team competed in the 21012 Manila Intervarsity Debate Tournament sponsored by UP. Their team ranked 15^th among over 60 teams. Marco finished third out of nearly 200 speakers in the tournament.

At present, he is completing his practice teaching at St. Joseph School of Pandacan in Manila. And he does his job using computers. “Everything now is computers- the school works are being encoded. Without that, I can’t do my work independently. I can’t scan book without computers. I do my job through power point presentations,” related Marco who lost his vision in his right eye when he was three. He was almost completely blind before he reached his 21^st birthday on December 21, 2006.

“There was the stigma, the social stereotype. That was the time I went through bigger challenges. But I’m happy and thankful to God that I survived those trials,” related Marco who lost his vision due to Retinopathy of Prematurity during birth.

A year after being blind, he took ATRIEV’s PC operations with Access Technology program .

After graduating from college, Marco told MST he intends to pursue higher studies in Literature or Creative writing. He wants another study grant. He will teach and inspire others. He also plans to take course either in social entrepreneurship and social development.

Asked if he has a girlfriend, Marco said he has one when he was in high school. But after becoming blind, he never had one.

Like Marco, Josefina Guillermo Olorocismo said the knowledge she got from ATRIEV keeps her struggling for life.

Olorocismo, ATRIEV’s chairman of the Board of Trustees, started her welcome remarks by saying that she had the chance to see the event’s guest speaker, Manila Vice Mayor Isko Moreno, before she lost her sight.

“I worked in a TV station, “That’s Entertainment” (the youth-oriented show hosted by German Moreno) was then very popular. And I saw how handsome the vice mayor, now a respected politician,” recalled Olorocismo.

It was in 1999 when Olorocismo became blind. She was at the peak of her career. That was also four years after she got married. She woke up one morning seeing nothing but darkness. “Those were the lowest moment of my life. So I believe in this venue, that there is still life after blindness,” said Olorocismo who belonged to the first batch of students of ATRIEV.

“So for those saying that there is no hope for the blind, I say it’s WRONG! There is still hope after blindness,” stressed Oloricismo. She said a blind people can also equal the sighted.

After taking a curse on medical transcriptionist offered by ATRIEV, Oloricismo said she now works as a transcriptionist of the Philippine Olympic committee and also the associate editor of their Parish newsletter.

The other IRIS awardees are Rhea Althea Guntalilib, first totally blind software developer; Ma. Criselda Bisda, first totally blind recruitment specialist in a call center; Glen Dimaandal, first low vision SEO manager; Raymond Reyes, low vision Rookie of the Year sales agent awardee of BPI/MS Insurance; Rene Orense and Jesse Gervacio, both low vision call center agents; Irish Ayesa Mendez, academic excellence; Mariecell Fornis, totally blind transcriptionists and virtual secretary; Lourdes Borgonia, totally blind web master; Julius Charles Serrano, web accessibility specialist award and Neil Lumba, most inspiring student./END

New York dentist buys planes for love of Batanes

New York dentist buys planes for love of Batanes

Dr. Mike’s duties: Heart stents on weekdays, laundry on Saturdays

By Macon Ramos-Araneta | Posted on Mar. 17, 2013 at 12:01am | 1,387 views

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Dr. Michelangelo Sabas

HE performs stenting from the wrist “to fix the heart” of people who had heart attacks and those with heart problems most days of the week, but on Saturdays, he does the laundry at home.
“It’s washday for me on Saturdays! It’s a washing machine and a dryer for me on Saturdays,” says Dr. Michelangelo Luzod Sabas, commonly known as Dr. Mike, an internist-cardiologist or interventional cardiologist at the Medical City in Pasig City.
Despite being one of the country’s topnotch interventionists who perform coronary angiogram (diagnostics), angioplasty (intervention) and stenting through the wrist, Dr. Mike tells MST in an interview that he washes their clothes because they don’t have a house maid.
“It’s only the three of us in our house. We’re not used to having people around us. Since we got married in 1997, we were only two until my wife gave birth,” says Dr. Mike, who ‘s turning 46 on May 8.
Dr. Mike says his wife, an internist-turned full-time housewife, irons her own clothes while he attends to his own clothes and those of their seven-year-old daughter.
He feels relaxed doing household chores and attending to their daughter. “She was born one kilogram, 30 weeks, short of one and a half months. She has some delays, but she’s catching up. She’s in regular school. So my wife focuses on her,” says Dr. Mike, adding their first-born, a boy, lived for only nine days.
“That’s the syndrome of some doctors. Due to long schoolings and long trainings, they get married late and give birth late,” he says.
If not fixing the heart of people, Dr. Mike is embroiled in fixing everything in the house. He’s grounded in their house.
“I seldom go to malls or elsewhere. If I’m not a doctor, I’m a carpenter… I don’t require a carpenter in the house unless there’s some welding job. I also do electrical works. I install electrical [equipment],” he says.
Even on Sundays, he stays in the house, after doing hospital rounds to check on his patients.
“We’re just like that—leading a simple life. I’m simple but my wife is simpler. We don’t like fancy stuffs. The only piece of jewelry we have is our wedding ring. And I don’t even wear it because it might get lost. I remove it everytime I do stenting,” he says. “When someone gifted me a watch, I just gave it away because there are watches all over, even in cellphones.”
He wants everything to be simple. He remembers having a short hair in school because it’s easier to maintain and to shampoo.
But on the five remaining days of the week, Dr. Mike is busy fixing the heart of his patients as a cardiologist and an interventionist.
“Our advocacy here in The Medical City, among us interventionists-cardiologists, —we are doing procedures to fix the heart in non-surgical ways. So we are propagating to fix the arteries of the heart [coronary arteries] through the wrist,” he says.
“You know patients with heart attacks, those having blockages in the arteries, we can fix them through puncture in the wrist. There’s no need to open, no need for stitches and scalpel,” he says.
He says stenting from the wrist is much safer due to less complications, compared to doing it from the groin.
This innovation, he says, affords a patient more comfort since angiogram from the groin prevents him from standing for six hours unlike if it is done from the wrist where he can immediately stand up after the procedure.
Furthermore, it is cheaper because there is no hospital admission unlike the procedure from the groin which needs two to three days of hospitalization.
While the stent from the wrist or the so-called radial approach has been in the country for over 10 years, it is being resorted to only in case there’s a problem with the groin.
“If a doctor can’t access on the groin, the alternate procedure would be from the wrist. But now, our advocacy is do it first from the wrist and if there’s problem, the backup would be from the groin,” says Dr. Mike.
He says the possible complications from the groin include bleeding from the punctured site. On the contrary, there is virtually no bleeding from the wrist because it is easily compressible.
Stroke and heart attack, which are less likely to occur if the procedure is done from the wrist, may also occur. “But these two are rare complications—one in every 40,000 cases,” he says.
The Medical City conducts more than 85 percent of its interventional cardiology procedures from the wrist.
While it is now widely used in the country and at The Medical City for the past three years, Dr. Mike says there are still consultants from other hospitals who are more comfortable doing it from the groin. He also says this is not the first option in other hospitals.
He does not want his accomplishments and recognitions publicized, but prefers talking about his intense passion about making available to all Filipinos the procedure he’s doing—stent from the wrist to fix the heart of the people that would eventually prolong their lives.
“I just dream the cost would go down and everybody gets this procedure. Right now, I’m optimistic due to the country’s improving economy. I hope because more and more patients are availing of the services. I am surprised. You can tell by the census that what we’re doing has been increasing. It covers those from the ABCD class,” says Dr. Mike, who hopes this would soon be included in Philhealth’s “package treatment.” The procedure amounts to P50,000 to P55,000.
He says stenting has been proven to reduce mortality and morbidity rate among heart patients. If a patient suffered a heart attack, the situation could turn worse, but this can be prevented by stenting from the wrist, although there is no 100-percent guarantee, he says.
Dr. Mike says he never thinks about the cost when a patient comes to him. “My No. 1 concern is to serve patients first without regard if I will be paid or not…..I just talk about the hospital cost since I can’t give it to them. I respect the business part, that’s viability of the hospital. But on my part, that is the least consideration. The first was for me to serve the patients’ needs during that time…. If I don’t get paid, no problem. We don’t keep a list,” he says.
He believes he does not need to go to a government hospital or on a medical mission to serve. “There are many around us who are in need of help,” says Dr. Mike, who is also a consultant of the Philippine Heart Center.
He concedes he can reach out to more poor people in being a rural doctor, if only provincial hospitals could be equipped with a catheter laboratory which would cost millions.
At one point in his life, this “one-of-kind” doctor felt the “calling” to become a priest. After graduating from elementary in his hometown Batac, Ilocos Norte, he went to Manila, and enrolled at the Christ the King Mission Seminary in Quezon City.
“I had this calling, but there was this ‘pull’. My sisters were then studying in medical school… I may have considered becoming a priest, but my role in the seminary was ‘infirmarian.” I was assigned to take care of the sick [seminarians] during that time. We had a role. I was still in first year, I was an infirmarian. So the medical field was ingrained in me even in seminary,” he says.
Upon leaving the seminary with a view towards Medicine, he took up Biology at University of Sto. Tomas and then pursued Medicine in the same school. During that time, her two elder sisters were doctors, one of them an internist who died in the US at the age of 34. There was also an uncle-doctor who was a father figure in the family. An adopted sister, now a nurse, stays with their 87-year-old father, a civil engineer.
Dr. Mike says he met his wife, a MedTech graduate at the UST College of Medicine. They were classmates and seatmates. “I used to copy from her since our seating arrangement was alphabetically arranged-me Sabas and she was Rodriquez,” recalls Dr. Mike.
He was a typical happy-go-lucky student who was seldom seen in the library reading because he would rather spend time with his “barkadas.”
Speaking about his wife, he says they were “sweethearts” since their sophomore years. “There was physical attraction because my wife was very beautiful,” she says.
After graduation, they got married in her wife’s hometown of Mariveles, Bataan.
“We spent our own money for the wedding because we didn’t want to ask. We were very idealistic. We saved up money for the wedding by working in provincial hospitals in Laguna and Cavite,” he says.
Dr. Mike says while they passed the US medical licensure examinations, they did not pursue their dream to proceed with their planned trainings due to several reasons.
Asked if he intends to practice his passion in a foreign land, Dr. Mike says he is committed to spending the rest of his medical profession at The Medical City.
“No, I just go abroad for trainings. There are many Filipinos who have heart problems so I want to do my passion and advocacy of The Medical City here in our country,” he says.
“I would just like to think of myself as a simple doctor at The Medical City whose foremost objective is to give the best service. I am happy where I am now, in fact, more than happy,” says Dr. Mike.
He says internal medicine gives him the chance to interact with patients and know their problems. With cardiology as his subspecialty, he finds the heart a very dynamic organ that does not stop working.
Dr. Mike says he gets some “adrenalin rush” in his profession as there is no dull moment with cardiology.
“If you really want to spell the difference in the field of health, a big chunk of this problem is with the heart,” he says.
Aside from doing household chores at home, Dr. Mike says bringing back to life a patient who is on the brink of death gives him fulfillment./.end